Thursday, November 7, 2013

(I’m writing this in the
wake of and as a way of thinking through a Twitter spat between a well-known
blogger/postdoc and a very well known anthropologist who practices anarchism.)

It begins with a question,
one rarely asked and so rarely responded to. Neither articulated nor answered,
the question persists as an inchoate feeling for and vague orientation toward
another. If we were to give voice to this question, to make it explicit, we
would thematize the mystery of this orientation, this feeling-for-another that
puts us in hesitant proximity with one another. The question might be phrased
as “Going my way?” What this question inaugurates through its inarticulation is
the astonishingly robust and ridiculously fragile collectivity that we are,
whoever we are. In not asking this question explicitly, we refuse to ask it
once and once only, we refuse to thematize a foundational orientation that
would determine, once and for all, who we are. We’re not a party, no arche or
nomos secures to us our identity as ourselves, and in refusing to ground our
collectivity through an inaugural determination of who we are and what we want,
we commit ourselves to the tense and uncertain work of feeling toward and with
one another. We are nothing but the uncertain feeling that we’re oriented
toward one another in our orientations toward something else. That we’re
inclined toward one another in the multiplicity of our inclinations.

I’ve been thinking a lot
about inclination recently. My thinking got started, believe it or not, with
Lorde—or, rather, with a critique
of Lorde that was making its rounds on the internet. It was a critique of the
function of racial signifiers in Lorde’s “Royals,” concluding with a claim
about Lorde’s functionality for a white supremacist patriarchal world. I didn’t
have any problem with the specifics of the reading; it’s correct, as far as it
goes. But I had the nagging suspicion that the critique was true to the extent
that it was false, that the adoption of a hermeneutic of suspicion vis-à-vis
Lorde was somehow inadequate. This, because I felt like the Lorde of Pure Heroine is, in some way, inclining
toward me, toward us—that the speaker of the album is, in some way, a
comrade-in-formation. Really truly. There’s too much class hatred and refusal
in the lyrics that I can’t not. Silly stupid utopian perhaps. Culture industry
people are free to laugh at me. But at stake for me here is the need to rethink
the modes by which we orient ourselves to our cultural objects—and, in turn, to
one another. (Let me keep talking about Lorde, but with the understanding that inquiry
into cultural relations here functions as a propaedeutic for a consideration of
political relations.) My worry is that we’re increasingly conflating the
necessity of critique with the production of allergies, that critique has given
way to simple criticism, that our critical performances are ultimately
functional for liberalism’s pulverization of the political. The point here
isn’t that Lorde’s lyrics in “Royals,” say, aren’t fucked up; they are, and
should be treated as such. But to what end? What’s at stake in this critique?
It’s striking to me that, while honest-to-Jesus political white supremacist
movements are treated with a smirk,
Lorde provokes outrage. It’s easy to ignore white supremacist movements or
mock them away for the simple reason that we can’t imagine a world in which we
would enter a political relation with them—that is, a political relation
constituted by amity. (I would argue that liberals can’t really imagine a
political relation of enmity with white supremacists either, and thus the
predominance of irony in liberal approaches to these formations.) Simply put,
we don’t share a world with white supremacists. For me, Lorde poses a different
political and interpretive challenge, insofar as I can imagine
sharing a world with her. (CLR JAMES READING GROUP WITH LORDE!) This
possibility of world-sharing and world-forming, of politics, requires the
adoption of an interpretive-critical mode that can simultaneously keep in view
what I take to be the sincerity of her refusal of the given and the violence of
the idiom through which she codes this refusal. We need, I think, a critical
practice primed by the feeling of co-inclination.

And not just so we can read
Lorde differently. Our impulse to critique, and our conversion of critique into mere criticism, is fucking us up.
Sometimes I feel like we’ve imported modes of cultural critique subtended by a
hermeneutics of suspicion into our relations with one another with the effect
that we listen to one another to hear why we shouldn’t listen to one another. When
I was thinking about the response to Lorde, I had this dream that we could
shift the imagined scenography of cultural critique—that we could treat her
less as an analysand rehashing symptomatic dreams on a Freudo-Marxian couch and
more as a well-meaning subject who has found her way into a meeting of a
radical collective but whose lack of an adequate idiom led her to mobilize a
messed up metaphorics. What do we do—ideally—in these situations? As I
understand the discourse ethics of such collectivities, the aim isn’t to reveal
the fucked-up-ness of the person as an end in itself or in order to boot the
person out, but to engage a practice of critique and correction with the
assumption that there’s a commitment to the maintenance and flourishing of the
relationship. Good intentions for bad actions don’t excuse anything, but
remaining mindful of the former allows for the composition of a scene in which
the latter can be refused and then repaired. It’s only our willingness to
foster such scenes that distinguishes friends from enemies: we repair the
fucked-up-ness of our friends, whereas we resist it in our enemies.

The decision to repair
instead of reject, to treat as flawed friend rather than infallibly flawed
enemy, to (re)produce a fraying relation instead of developing an allergy, is
ultimately organized by fictions of intention, sincerity, possibility, and so
on. We feel that we’re inclined toward one another, that we’re going the same
way, and this basic affect/orientation makes non-allergic critique both
possible and necessary. We imagine we’re going the same way even if we
sometimes decline from one another or swerve away into terrible things. We
survive through these fictions. We live on them and through them for the simple
reason that we are all too wounded by this world to not carry fucked-up-ness
with us in ways we can’t even know without the rigorous, critical, sustaining,
and enriching help of our revolutionary friends. If you read this blog, you’ve
probably experienced the extraordinary act of love that is getting called out
by a comrade. I can recall vividly each time I’ve been so called out, and I’m
deeply grateful for all of them—even if thinking about what precipitated them
makes me shudder in embarrassment. We don’t need to worry that this fiction
makes us stupid, less-than-critical; there are obviously firm limits to the
fiction of co-inclination. I read with Lorde, for instance, whereas I wouldn’t
read with Miley Cyrus. In terms of real people doing real things, there
probably wasn’t an Occupy encampment in the U.S. that didn’t have one figure
(almost certainly a white guy) so resistant to others’ labor of critique and
repair that the fiction of co-inclination dropped and this figure
converted into an enemy. We need to trust our feelings, to prioritize in
practice the weird orientations toward others that we can’t fully explain or
thematize. It’s this feeling of co-inclination that prevents every critique
from becoming a collective crisis, that allows critique to become a means of
collectivity formation.

We, whoever we are, are constituted
by felt fictions of co-inclination. Without these felt fictions, we are
probably little more than the gaggle of isolated and auto-isolating idiots that Yankee Leninists
take us to be when we say things like “Check your privilege” or “That’s fucked
up.” Critique can only be the antonym of collective corrosion when we recall
that we’re going to get in one another’s way as we go on our way, together,
maybe. Indeed, critique is a mode of collective augmentation when its animated
by a commitment, however vague, to maintaining the world that we co-produce,
that we’re on the way toward. So, let’s rewrite the dictum of Kant, the one he
put in the emperor’s mouth, the one that serves as a mantra for liberals and
Leninists alike, the one that goes, “Argue as much as you like about whatever
you like, but obey!” Let’s rewrite it as, “Argue as much as you like about
whatever you like, but incline!” Critique and critique hard. But never suppress
the felt possibility that we, whoever we are, are going one another’s way.